Breaking the Mold

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Breaking the Mold

The folks at Aardman Features have always had a way with clay. They won our hearts by molding low-key English humor into claymation treasures like Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit series. But for their latest film, Flushed Away, they decided to ditch the labor-intensive stop-motion technique for CG. Codirector David Bowers says that, given the aesthetic complexity of Flushed, it made sense for Aardman to make the leap. The action flows through the London sewer system, a bustling animal metropolis that required the kind of crowd scenes and rippling water effects for which CG is the poop: "We had thousands of characters cheering, laughing, and walking around," Bowers says, and no one had to painstakingly reposition each one between frames. But even though Aardman used DreamWorks' digital render farm in Glendale, California, the studio tried to maintain its signature handmade feel. "In the computer, everything is always so symmetrical," fellow director Sam Fell says. "I made a habit of telling everyone to add in imperfections." Here's hoping we can still see Aardman's fingerprints all over the final cut.